As you might imagine, Christmas Eve is a very special occasion in Hell. For a start, it's a lousy place to spend Christmas Eve and to add to that The Management is always adding new torments and there's nothing quite like holiday-themed damnation. Christmas Eve is extra special though because Satan gives himself a wonderful little present. The Papal Visit.

Every year just before the stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve, the Pope's spirit gets popped out of his body and given a scenic tour of Hell. Satan and his devils aren't allowed to directly harm a living mortal soul but there's so much they can do without ever singeing the hair around your tonsure. The Pope is told from the outset that he's under no obligation and can return at any time but that if he visits every last damned soul then he can choose one to take back to the mortal realm to be reborn. After touring all of Hell, or as much as he can stomach, the Pope's soul is popped back into his body an instant after it left. Time runs differently Down There.

Satan gets a real kick out of this. The Pope never remembers anything consciously, but the subconscious horrors taint his decisions for the rest of the year. The returned soul almost always squanders its opportunity and ends up back in Hell and the increase in business from the Pope's bad decisions more than makes up for a single soul anyway.

Needless to say, taking the Pope through all of Hell is an elaborate process. There's a specially trained guide imp raised just for the occasion to show the Pope each of the billions of damned souls. It has to be a new one each year because Hell's population is ever-growing and it takes them a full year of training.

There's also a head devil to organize the tour through each Circle of Hell. Given that there are nine Circles, and thus nine Christmas Papal Visit Devils, they got nicknamed The Reindeer. They do not resemble mortal reindeer in any sense. The ugliest and nastiest of the lot is in charge of the ninth and innermost circle of Hell. He's got the nickname Rudolph.

Now every damned soul in Hell wants to be promoted to a higher rank because then you get to relieve your suffering by tormenting others. So in compensation, higher devils are given special new custom-made torments. Rudolph's was that every time he took a step his feet would burst into bright crimson flame like the better class of road flares.

The other thing about higher devils is that they're ambitious. So when Asmodeus needed a distraction for his latest scheme he tapped Rudolph for some help. It was a simple plan. Kill off the imp. The only other being with that detailed knowledge of Hell's denizens is Satan himself so he'd be busy showing the Pope around.

Imps aren't easy to kill. A mystical item of great power such as Grond or the Silver Dagger of Shiva is needed. Rudolph had opted for the iron-studded cudgel of Menoetius. A few minutes before the Papal Visit was scheduled to start Rudolph wandered nonchalantly toward to imp. He was in a good mood. It was raining frogs which meant it was going to be a green Christmas.

Rudolph brings the cudgel down across the back of the imps skull in blow that would have flattened a small hill. The imp doesn't even stagger. It's a setup of course. This is Hell. They expect the higher devils to be ambitious. That's how they got there. And this is the Ninth Circle of Hell, reserved for traitors. With an eye-wrenching wriggle the imp transforms into Satan himself.

And then one froggy Christmas Eve Satan came to say, "Rudolph with your toes alight, you won't slay my guide tonight."

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Flesh and blood of a dead star, slain in the apocalypse of supernova, resurrected by four billion years of continuous autocatalytic reaction and crowned with the emergent property of sentience in the dream that the universe might one day understand itself.